The Other Greek Crisis

Mohammadi Younus grew up in Ghazni Province, in the east of Afghanistan, and studied medicine in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He had “a problem with the Taliban… a political problem” during the dark days of their rule, and he landed in jail. He decided to leave the country and crossed into Iran.

He bought a fake passport for a little more than two thousand dollars and made it to Turkey. He registered there as a refugee with the United Nations and chose Greece as his next destination because he had learned the Hippocratic oath, and Hippocrates was Greek. In 2004, he applied for asylum and was accepted, probably because of his medical education.

It was a rare achievement. That year, he estimates, about six thousand migrants applied for asylum in Greece; he was one of eleven who were accepted. Now there are about twenty-five thousand undocumented Afghans crowded into the country; the backlog of asylum applications has reached sixty thousand. Younus tries to aid the more recent arrivals from back home. He directs the Afghan Refugees and Migrants Community Organization from a modest office off Omonoia Square, in Athens. As he put it succinctly one recent afternoon, “Asylum doesn’t work.”

Not for Greece, at least. The country has been saddled not only with unmanageable debts, austerity budgets, and German condescension but also with the frontline burdens of a broken European Union asylum and migration regime that combines high ideals with deep denial.

At least eight out of ten illegal migrants to the European Union enter through Greece, often by making a perilous raft crossing on the Evros River from Turkey. Mohammadi followed a trail across Iran and Turkey and into Greece that is now attempted by as many as five hundred desperate people each day. There are more than a hundred thousand Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Somalis, Sudanese, Nigerians, and other migrants stuck in Greece—where the economy has shrunk for five consecutive years, and where the unemployment rate for citizens is just above twenty-four per cent.

This migrant bottleneck is the result of an E.U. design that now looks almost as flawed as the euro. It is called Dublin II, and it was struck amid the fiscal, monetary, and economic optimism of 2003. It holds that asylum seekers to E.U. countries can only be evaluated and adjudicated in the country where they enter first. The geography-driven effect of this rule has been to allow Germany, France, and other countries that are attractive destinations for undocumented economic migrants to push off on Greece administrative, welfare, and policing burdens that its weak government could not handle even when times were good.

The Greek financial crisis reflects complicity between profit-hungry northern-European lenders and reckless southern borrowers. The migrant crisis has a darker, portentous quality. The prostrate, corrupt, criminalized Greek state and the restive population it serves lack the will, the capacity, or the clout within Europe to manage Greece’s position in Dublin II. What has Germany offered? It has sent police called “document consultants,” who scan Greek airports and ferry ports “to keep a lookout for suspicious travellers” who might be headed north, as a recent Der Spiegel account described. “The rest of Europe has sealed itself off.”

After all but encouraging a Greek exit from the euro zone earlier this year, European leaders, particularly German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have stepped back from that brink. A Greek election in June delivered a government in Athens that is more plausibly committed to Europe’s fiscal rules, and the fragility of Spanish and Italian debt markets over the summer argued against a gamble that Greece’s departure could be managed as an exceptional case. By the numbers, then, the risk that Greece’s meltdown will destroy the euro now looks much reduced. But the numbers can’t account for the political and social cauldron that austerity and the under-resourced Dublin II regime have combined to create, particularly on the streets of Athens.

In June, Greeks voted for Europe, but they also delivered a record number of votes to Golden Dawn, a previously marginal rightist-nationalist party whose thugs, wearing their signature black T-shirts, terrorize Mohammadi Younus’s clients and other migrants in the capital. When I was in Athens last month, police commanders influenced by the Golden Dawn agenda launched the modern country’s largest ever sweep against migrants, deploying scores of police to check the residence papers of dark-skinned, foreign-looking people. The operation will continue indefinitely, a police spokesman said.

One afternoon, in an Athens neighborhood with a large migrant population, I watched Greek police in body armor pull dark-skinned passersby into lines to examine their papers, before loading the undocumented onto waiting buses, for transport to detention camps. Of course, the camps are decent, and something like the rule of law pertains, but it still looked like a scene from the nineteen-thirties. (It was also a preview of what the streets of Phoenix might look like some day, if Arizona’s most ardent anti-immigrant activists, who have already received partial backing from the United States Supreme Court, have their way.)

Rightist parties have surged across Europe, but they have fallen back after reaching a certain threshold (as just happened in the Netherlands), and probably the same will happen to Golden Dawn. The Greek vote for the rightists had more to do with an anti-incumbency surge than with virulent nationalism; even under pressure, Athens feels in many respects like a tolerant, resilient, forward-looking city.

Yet its stresses are accumulating. The dominant narrative of the European Union’s crisis emphasizes finance over human security; it ignores marginal populations like undocumented Africans and South Asians; and it equates the weaknesses of the Greek state with moral failure. It is a narrative that belongs to creditors; on the streets of Athens, none of it seems in balance.

Photograph by Moises Saman/Magnum.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.